Thursday, 24 December 2015

I was bored and jetlagged this Xmas, so I decided to follow Bandcamps job-hunting scavenger hunt: they lead prospective hires through several Unix-savvy tasks across the internet. I'd love to work in an applied musicology setting, but because I'm an ecologist, its highly unlikely they'd actually hire me. So, as pre-rejection revenge, I'm going to spoil the scavenger hunt! Well, not really, but its a great demostration for my students WHAT skills are needed in the massive-information economy, and how unconventional (and applied) their hiring process can be.

Task 1: source code
On the Bandcamp jobsite, prospects are asked to look at the Websites source code. Tool: wget
$ wget --output-document-file /tmp/bd.html https://bandcamp.com/jobs/#systems
... Upon downloading, one must open the file and scour the annotations for the next instruction...

Task 2: Bandcamp API
"Job hunters, use the Bandcamp API (use API key 'buithagsitannagalladrodlask') to get the url of band id 1 and go there. (Hint: not all API versions are the same."
Which is an annoying detour through the particulars of their API: its a simple URL-based information retreival system. Send a URL, receive JSON information. Answer: http://api.bandcamp.com/api/band/1/info?band_id=1&key=buithagsitannagalladrodlask which leads us to http://bandcamp.bandcamp.com for our next clue.

Task 3: ruby decrypting
http://bandcamp.bandcamp.com invites the job-hunter to download a music file, like any other Bandcamp download site. However, the output is not a FLAC, it is 7 large (seemingly) junk files in some scrambled ordered, variously called: "Bandcamp - You’re Getting Warm - part51.txt". Presumeably, the mystery files are something to be concatentated, in some order, the clue being a string of ruby code: "srand(42); 7.times {puts rand(100)}". This seemingly random operation is seeded, for a reproducible output. 51,92,14,71,60,20,82

Task 4: cat a wav
The ruby code spits out the order of the files. Now what? Lets use Unix 'cat' to make a new file. The header in the first file '51' is "RIFF": some quick internet-searching reveals that the intended format is a WAV audio file. So, we output the concatenation as a wav file and it plays. A synth-voice tells us where to send resumes and what is the secret-codeword to add so they don't delete our application.

Hurray! That's a lot of work for an ecologist. But what's a more impressive prospect? An ecologist who knows Linux and APIs, or a comp-sci student who is idle enough to follow a silly scavenger hunt?